The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (review)

The editors of The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain begin with a reflection upon two paintings, "Federigo da Montefeltro and his son Guidobaldo" (Joos van Gent, fl. 1460-75) and Titian's "Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto" (1573-1575), the latter exalting Phillip II 's defeat of the Ottoman Turks. The paintings are both double portraits of powerful fathers with their young sons, images of noblemen proving themselves to be "good at being men." These men are wealthy, learned, militarily seasoned, and, importantly, capable of producing male heirs destined to continue the manly performances of their progenitors. Nevertheless, the portraits also "expose masculinity as a process and, in so doing, reveal the specter of masculine gender failure" (21). The paintings are thus emblematic of the multiple vectors of masculinity that the thirteen essays in The Poetics of Masculinity explore. Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus conceive of the "poetics of masculinity" as both the subject and effect of representation: the anthology as a whole considers the related questions of "how masculinity is represented in literary texts" (13), "how the different representational strategies in such texts produce masculinity" (13), and finally, "how issues of masculinity may have shaped literary form itself " (15).

Baldassare Castiglione and his Book of the Courtier—a work that praises Spanish figures as perfect princes and courtiers and was first published when the author was living in Toledo—epitomize the meeting of Spain, Italy, and the poetics of masculinity throughout the anthology. In "Castiglione: Love, Power, and Masculinity," Ian Frederick Moulton remarks upon the "impossible social performance" outlined in the first book of the Book of the Courtier: the courtier must be "exceedingly fierce, harsh, and always among the first, wherever the enemy is; and in every other place, humane, modest, reserved" (131). Although Moulton's is the fourth essay in the anthology, this conundrum of correct masculine performance is a central theme in many of the essays. Castiglione's courtier stands in a vexed position to discourses of masculinity in the early modern era. To be a perfect courtly male is to risk "softness," and the Book of the Courtier is thus at once the source of ideal masculinity and the dangers of effeminacy. The Book of the Courtier and the other works studied here relentlessly return to questions of gender performance in all spheres of life. These texts show masculinity in all its fragility and impossibility, with its need for constant testing and reassertion in the face of the perennial threats of sodomy, effeminacy, and loss of honor.

The collection opens with Gary Cestaro's superb "Pederastic Insemination, or Dante in the Grammar Classroom." Taking as his starting point the Inferno, where Brunetto Latini languishes among the condemned sodomites, Cestaro "locates through Dante and in medieval/early modern grammar a fantasy of male cultural reproduction" (41), in which violent physical and sexual abuse underlies male educational privilege. Here we find one of the first impossibilities of masculinity. A good man must master grammar, but in so doing he must pass through the sort of "sexualized initiation rite" (51) alluded to by Dante and many others. Indeed, as Cestaro argues, the sexually predatory grammar master was a widespread stereotype in both literature and the visual arts.

Tylus and Leah Middlebrook, in essays analyzing poetic production in the late fifteenth-century Florentine circle of Lorenzo de Medici and in sixteenth-century Castile, consider how "to raise the topic of poetry was to raise the topic of masculinity," in Middlebrook's words (143). Tylus studies the tense relationship between masculinity and mother tongues in the emergence of an Italian vernacular literary canon "based largely on love and not war" (78), but which continually looks back to epic forefathers. Middlebrook surveys how the Castilian poets who took up the "new art," preferring Italianate forms to the traditional ones, were acutely aware of how they...